I can definitely understand why many people think it’s a terrible idea to allow a Chinese company to collect massive amounts of personal information about Americans, including location data. It’s even more obvious why we shouldn’t facilitate this process on government devices. So, I can see why TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company, is no longer a permissible app on government phones and computers and on many state university servers. Montana just became the first state to ban TikTok for general use. That’s a different kettle of fish.
My starting point on this is that the primary concern about TikTok is not that they collect data in a substantially different way than other social media applications. The problem seems to be almost wholly that the Chinese government has the theoretical power to use the data in any way they see fit. ByteDance can give all the assurances in the world, but people simply don’t trust the Chinese government to keep its mitts off. There’s even a concern that China can weaponize the app at a time of its choosing by using it to distribute misinformation. These are valid concerns, but I wonder if the world is really this black and white.
In the brick and mortar world, it’s hard to know what you’re talking about these days when you say a company is German or Japanese, Chinese or South Korean. The Toyotas and BMWs you’re driving may have been built in America with supply chains spanning the globe. It’s easy to identify an address for corporate headquarters, but investors can come from anywhere. While plans to take ByteDance public stalled in 2021, it has plenty of investors, including Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital.
What I’m saying is that it’s hard for me to see TikTok as a unique threat. This doesn’t mean that I don’t see the causes of consternation. I see them very well, and I think they extend to apps in general irrespective of where corporations are headquartered. Consumers are giving away too much information and they’re too susceptible to information manipulation. A state like Montana can ban TikTok, but even assuming the law passes all constitutional challenges, it will do very little to protect Montanans from the same threats emanating from different apps and different corporations.
If I thought that Europe, the West and the “free world” were developing sufficient protections and that China was flouting these rules, then I’d feel very differently about this issue, but as things stand my main worry is that TikTok’s Chinese ownership is distracting people from the larger problem.
I also think the proponents of free speech, like the American Civil Liberties Union which will fight the Montana law in court, are providing a distraction. The ACLU takes their fights as they come, and I understand that, but no one is trying to curtail speech. The goal is to keep a potential weapon out of China’s hands and to protect unwitting consumers. TikTok is not the only way to express yourself, and if it’s not a safe product then I have no problem banning it.
It’s just that I don’t see how this general problem can be defined in a principled way that can be consistently applied, and I don’t see the broader problems being addressed in an adequate way. Who makes up the list of countries who cannot put apps on our phones? Who maintains the list? And, in banning TikTok, are we forgetting that many of the same consumer vulnerabilities are created by Instagram, Twitter or Facebook?
On a purely political level, I don’t think people are seeing this issue clearly. Millions of Americans love TikTok and are willing to accept the risks. They won’t understand why they’re losing their preferred social media platform if these questions aren’t answered in a very open and compelling way. I think politicians will discover that any credit they get for being tough on China is dwarfed by the backlash they receive for users of the app.
I’m willing to consider that Chinese ownership of TikTok is a severed artery-level problem, but legally defining the problem is very hard and a band-aid won’t protect people’s information or prevent the weaponization of social media by bad state actors.
More broadly, it’s one of the great human achievements of the past 60 years that 2/3 of the people in China (and Southeast Asia) are no longer living in destitution and on the brink of starvation each day. (I believe the number’s down to about 3% or less.) What would a foreign policy that seeks to build on that accomplishment look like?
The fact that that’s happened to some significant degree at the expense of the US working-class and to the immense profit of the ultra-rich is, I think, one of the main obstacles to moving forward. It seems to me that building multi-lateral and global institutions, and working towards a multi-polar world ought to be a central and overarching goal of US foreign policy. That means, among other things, more power for China, India, Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, etc.
(Note: power is not necessarily zero-sum; more power for those countries doesn’t mean less power for the US, Germany, Japan, etc.)